Uncertainty-Aware Evidential Fusion for Multi-Modal Object Detection in Autonomous Driving

The advancement of autonomous driving technologies necessitates the development of sophisticated object detection systems capable of integrating heterogeneous sensor data to overcome the inherent limitations of unimodal approaches. While multi-modal fusion strategies offer promising solutions, they confront significant challenges including data alignment complexities in early fusion and computational burdens coupled with overfitting risks in deep fusion methodologies. We propose a Multi-modal Multi-class Late Fusion (MMLF) framework that operates at the decision level. This design preserves the architectural integrity of individual detectors and facilitates the flexible integration of diverse modalities. A key innovation of our approach is the incorporation of an evidence-theoretic uncertainty quantification mechanism, built upon Dempster-Shafer theory, which provides a mathematically grounded measure of confidence and significantly enhances the reliability and interpretability of the detection outcomes. Comprehensive experimental evaluation on the KITTI benchmark dataset demonstrates that our method achieves substantial performance improvements across multiple metrics, including 2D detection, 3D localization, and bird’s-eye view tasks. The framework reduces uncertainty estimates across different object categories. This work provides a versatile and scalable solution for multi-modal object detection that effectively addresses critical challenges in autonomous driving applications.